BigStock Image, GeekWire Graphic / Monica NickelsburgThe digital snow day is over, as Amazon Web Services has fixed the issues with its Simple Storage Service, or S3 for short, that crippled significant chunks of the internet Tuesday.
RELATED: AWS cloud storage back online after outage cripples popular sites
Starting a little after 9:30 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, and lasting close to five hours, the S3 cloud storage service started experiencing “high error rates.” This outage knocked out access to a litany of websites and apps that run on AWS, including but not limited to Expedia, Slack, Medium, the U.S.

Internet firms like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Netflix are the new media companies. They deliver enormous amounts of video online, posing a direct threat to old-school television and movie companies. But they also are becoming telecoms, threatening the likes of AT&T and Verizon.

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon didn’t, quite, break the Internet Tuesday but an outage of one of the main storage systems for its AWS cloud computing company caused headaches for hundreds of thousands of websites across the United States.

Portions of Amazon Web Services’ Amazon S3 system went offline Tuesday afternoon, a service used by 148,213 websites according to SimilarTech.